Portrait photographs are often taken in a portrait studio. Such a studio often includes a variety of decorative background images that can be arranged behind a subject, and one or more lighting units that illuminate the subject. A film or digital camera is used to capture the subject's image while the subject is posing in the portrait studio.
When images are captured in the portrait studio, all of the various components must be operating properly or the quality of the resulting photographs will be compromised. Due to the relatively large number of components in such a studio, it is possible that a problem with the portrait studio components may go unnoticed by the photographer. In most cases, such a problem results in photographs that are of insufficient quality, and requires that all of the pictures that were taken with the faulty component will need to be retaken. Accordingly, it is desirable to identify any such problems prior to a photography session so that the problems can be resolved before the photographs are taken.
One partial solution is to design a photography studio including smart components. In this example, each component has a control system that monitors the status of the respective component and communicates the status to other components. While such a system would overcome some of the problems, there would also be several drawbacks. For example, such as system would be complicated and expensive to design and manufacture. Further, unless extremely sophisticated control systems were designed, such smart components may not identify all possible failures. For example, a smart lighting system may be configured to communicate a message whenever the light is triggered, but may not reveal that the light is pointing in a wrong direction.
Although a dedicated photography studio can have a carefully controlled environment, portable photography studios are typically placed in environments such as a school or other building that can have very different characteristics, such as different colored rooms and different lighting conditions. As a result, if a first set of photographs is taken at one location and another set of photographs is taken at another location, the characteristics of the resulting photographs can also have wide variability and lack consistency.
For example, if the first location has bright red walls, the resulting photographs may have a red tint. A second location that does not have red walls will result in photographs that do not have the red tint. If the first location is bright and the second location is dark, the resulting photographs will similarly lack consistency. If the photographs are subsequently combined into a single product, such as a picture book or other composite product where the photographs from each location may be visible at the same time, the variability of these characteristics of the photographs can be very noticeable and undesirable. Further, subsequent processing of the digital images to attempt to manually correct for such differences one-by-one is difficult and time consuming.
Therefore, there is a need for a system and method of capturing photographs that overcomes the deficiencies of the prior art.